


The Tusks of the Elephant

by Nemonus



Category: Control (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-11-26 08:28:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20927171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: Jesse and Polaris, on five steps of their journey.





	The Tusks of the Elephant

**I. Search**

“I like to imagine animals.” Kate took another swallow of her coffee and stared into the North Carolina sky.

“Me too,” said Jesse Faden.

The truck stop was quiet. Occasionally a car would whip along I-95. Morning fog loomed over green-gray forest, making Jesse pull her jacket tighter around her. A visitor in a hurry had overturned a coffee cup by the door to the convenience store, flecks of brown in the cup's mouth. The smells of coffee and oil, hot blacktop and fresh air, moved back and forth in the furtive breeze.

The latest hunt had brought Jesse here, to the forested mountains that stretched through Georgia and the Carolinas. There were plenty of places a government organization could hide here. She could almost make herself remember that someone had described the base when she had overheard the agents talking in Ordinary: deep in a forest, on an unmarked road that might pass for park service to the uninformed. But those were just memories she _wanted _to believe in, wishful thinking changing her own childhood like an eraser shedding chalk dust. She was no closer to the base, except that she had heard some of the letters to the CIA ended up in New York City, at a building called Long Lines. It was something. But right now, it would not bring Dylan back by itself.

So she was waiting to wake up after sleeping in her car. The truck stop had hot coffee and Kate, whose jowled, pockmarked face held an expression of deep and pleasant contemplation. Her rust-red 18-wheeler hulked next to the water fountain.

“You know when you were a kid, and you pictured animals running alongside the car?” Kate said.

Jesse nodded.

“Like that. Helps me stay awake.”

Polaris buzzed like carbonated water. The blue shimmer always rested behind Jesse’s eyes now, had since the incident she could barely remember. It had all blurred together into a melange of small-town blocks and the curb by the elementary school and the pictures on social workers’ office walls. She could see Polaris’ overlay and the world at the same time. It was a rare occasion when Polaris completely took over her vision, but it had happened. It was one of the things that frightened her most about Polaris. But even back then, Polaris was protecting her and guiding her like the star she was named for.

_She’s not pretend_, Jesse resisted saying. _She’s my friend, and she helps me sleep._

“I do that sometimes too,” Jesse said. “But not when I’m driving. Been a while since someone else drove.”

_You don’t have a license, do you?_

The blue fractal shimmer made itself known and then dissipated, like a crystalline laugh.

“You travel for work?” Kate asked.

“Not exactly.”

“It’s truckers out here, usually. Some federal cars, some tourists on their way to Blue Ridge.”

Jesse stuffed her hands in her pockets. “What kind of federal cars?” Could this be the answer, at last? Could she have happened to talk to the right person, who knew?

“Parks, I think.”

“Have you ever heard about federal offices around here?”

“Don’t think so.”

_Don’t press. Feel out whether she likes conspiracy theories._

She didn’t. She worked from a hub in Texas, but stayed on the road when she could. Moving around suited Kate.

“You must have seen some strange things on the road.” Jesse smiled and waited for Polaris to wake up. _She _would know when they were on the right track.

Strange places to Kate were windmill farms, the whirl of rocks in the exposed strata of the San Andreas fault, endless corn fields. Sure, Jesse found those strange too. Polaris reached curious arms toward them like an octopus. But none, not one, had ever reached back.

The cold wind stirred Jesse’s hair. She shook her head. Of course, one conversation would not change the course of her search. Maybe she would never find the bureau. Maybe she would never find what was left of her family.

“You look like somebody walked over your grave,” Kate said.

“I’m looking for something,” Jesse said. “And one day I _will_ find it.”

_There is the key_, Polaris said.

Jesse squeezed her keys in her hand, hard enough to hurt. Encouragement helped her get up in the morning, but it did not move her closer to finding her brother.

Kate hid her expression behind her plastic-and-paper cup.

In the morning, Jesse and Polaris moved north.

* * *

**II. Parameters**

“So you can detect Polaris?” Jesse sat on a gurney. The office Emily Pope had chosen for her lab during the lockdown was filled with boxes, instruments, and the long medical bed that Jesse guessed she had borrowed from a Ranger medic. Posters on the wall and the desk pushed into a corner proved it had once been a small executive cluster.

“Yes. I mean, we can detect as much as we can see. Can’t detect something you aren’t looking for.” Emily laughed as she pressed a thin, red adhesive patch against Jesse’s forehead. Jesse was beginning to notice when Emily’s laughs changed from polite, deep amusement to delighted giggles. Emily was walking right on the edge now, between professional interest and her often-masked fascination with her work.

Polaris shimmered in Jesse’s mind, saying _assent, amusement, joy._

“You know the story about the blind men and the elephant?” Jesse was not yet finishing Emily Pope’s sentences, but she was comfortable enough to speak in vague metaphor. Emily would not begrudge her for lacking the scientist’s precision.

The patch was cold. Emily moved her hand away. “Yes, but I have to object! We aren’t blind. It’s misleading to start out thinking we’re blind. If anything … the elephant is infrared!”

“Hmm.” Jesse pressed her lips together.

_That’s one way to think about it._

Emily adjusted the machinery on the other end of the red thread attached to the adhesive. “So, what part of the elephant do you think Polaris is?”

“Maybe the tusks? She’s connected somehow to the powers I have.” Jesse peered at the back of her hand, then the front. “What do you think?”

“I’m not good with metaphors.” Emily attended to a machine that whirred. “But I’m good with resonance, and hers tells me we don’t have the equipment we need here. I know she exists. But what exactly she is? You’ll have to unseal Research first.” Emily sighed.

Research was infested, and Jesse would have to push deeper into the Oldest House to find it. The Hiss had stolen people’s bodies and minds. Killing them granted either murder or mercy. Jesse preferred to think of it as the latter. She had found her way here; she could certainly find her way through. Better a gun/sword from a dead man than an endless search out on the road.

“No problem.” Jesse smiled.

* * *

**III. Poison**

The Hiss was an incursion.

The Oldest House had been a body around her for so long that she could almost feel it breathe. Maybe the rhythm had started when she walked between black columns while following visions of Ahti’s world. Maybe it had started when she had walked off of the rain-wet sidewalk in the city into the foyer, and the floor was so dry.

Throughout, she had sensed where the body was cancerous. The Hiss was the most malignant, the Mold the deepest.

Maybe that sensation of virality, of embodiedness, was why she was so surprised when she finally saw Hedron’s form. Instead of being organic it looked metal, slick and riveted. The industrial shapes were as alien to her as the kaleidoscopic growth of the Mold had once been. Even so, she _knew _that the thing in Dimensional Research was Polaris. She _felt _the same. Something in her tugged Jesse closer, made her feel more energetic. In this room, Jesse was lighter than air and faster than light.

And Hedron was in _danger._

_ Help! _Polaris screamed like a person, like a woman trapped in a burning building, like a child under a bully’s fists, like the space left behind when everyone in Ordinary _vanished._

Jesse’s powers expressed themselves in uncanny momentum. She flew from onyx pillar to onyx pillar, pushed forward by strategy and physics and need. Shields shattered. The scream of her own power buffeted her ears along with the whistle of rockets and rapid-fire gunshots.

And as she flew there was time for one weakness, just one, which existed for a short moment until it was burned up in a flash by the fire of her fury and her focus:

_How can I tell anyone if I lose something that only exists inside my head?_

She reached the top. She watched the last supports fall. She stepped in the trap.

* * *

**IV. Submission**

Polaris was an incursion.

She was a tumor, and the Hiss were digging her out.

Jesse felt unknown forces pulling her hair back, her chin up. Arching her into the pose of the first-taken, the spores, the vanguard, the Hiss. Images flashed in front of her: Jesse and Polaris, Jesse and Dylan, Jesse and Polaris, fast, like slides. Hear the click at the end of each picture? Hear the gunshots? Hear how each corner of the slide is death? Hear how each door opens in the footsteps between them? The Slide Projector was a landscape, and it never stopped quaking.

Jesse saw herself and her brother standing on the one stable spot on the planet.

(It is the Oldest House. It is _not _the Oldest House.)

Polaris in the form of a panther, languid and toothy, at her side.

_Something else_ in the form of a wolf at Dylan’s side, red drool dripping from wide-stretched jaws, smoke coiling around its shoulders. Jesse tried to scream for Polaris’ comforting presence and could not. She had been there so long. Through the therapy and the searching and the dull work and the counting pennies. The Jesse who remembered being without Polaris was not the same person at all. She had to _save her!_

_They’re our imaginary friends, _said Dylan. _Isn’t that sweet? Now, it is time to see a real thing._

The wolf clawed the tumor out.

The tumor was an essential organ.

Jesse’s connection to Polaris snapped.

_ You are a worm though time…_

* * *

**V. A Letter From Human Resources**

After the end, after she cleansed Dylan and no red cloud of wolf-monster came fangs-first from his soul, Jesse held Polaris like a sister. The blue shimmed around her as a comforting corona.   
****

And Jesse sat at the Director’s desk and decided what she would change. Polaris was not a presence behind her eyes, could not be seen by anyone else. She did not have to be, because she was _here_. She had _come back._

_ Here_, said Polaris. _Light glimmering off water_, said Polaris.

Hedron had enabled Jesse to tap into Polaris, and although she might never be able to understand what Hedron _was_, she was thankful for her.

Jesse sat back in her chair and pressed her palm against the cool wood of the desk. This was still Trench’s desk, still the place where he had died and where the House had perhaps soaked up his blood. It did not feel like hers yet, and perhaps never would. But she wore the sigil/signal of the alien Board, and thus far they had been benevolent. Maybe one day that would change.

_People _in the House needed to become more benevolent, too. Jesse looked at her own portrait above the desk. She would make sure what happened to Dylan never happened again. Jesse had spoken to Emily about what Research should and should not be. If she could talk to Dylan, she would. She would begin to make lists of who she needed to report to.

Or perhaps that list was just one/many. The Board saw everything.

At least, Jesse would keep the Directorship from becoming what it had been in Dylan’s vision. Something in here had corrupted Trench. It had not been simple bureaucracy, although that had been part of the cruelty. There was cruelty soaked into the carpets. That, too, she could dispel.

But not without talking to people first. Not without creating her own team, starting with Emily, who could help Jesse keep her head on straight. She trusted her own decisions, but she needed people with history with this strange place.

She stood up and crossed the room. The wood of the door was also cool against her hand, a relief as if the House had been released from fever.

Ahti stood on the other side, mop in hand. Maybe he too looked less feverish, his skin less gray. “Clean up after that thing you’ve got.” The mop lurched across the floor. “You know how.”

_ Shield_, said Polaris. _Power_, said Polaris.

Jesse Faden walked through her Oldest House with her head high and her hands steady.

_We do know how._


End file.
